Retired military couple scrambles to paint Ohio home to avoid more jail time

Sheridan Hendrix, Columbus Dispatch

Tuesday

Apr 2, 2019 at 10:41 AM

Anna Crawford and her husband, Bill, took advantage of the mild weather Wednesday afternoon to start scraping the peeling blue paint off the exterior of their Lancaster, Ohio home. Anna has picked out a light gray color to replace the exterior paint.

“The whole house will eventually be ‘Civil War gray,’” she said, “because that’s what this whole thing has felt like.”

In November, the Crawfords received a notice from the city that they needed to repaint their 100-year-old home. Since then, they said, it’s been “a total nightmare.”

Anna, 69, and Bill, 74, are both retired from the U.S. Navy and survive mainly off their military pensions. They’ve lived in their house on North Columbus Street for 35 years.

The exterior paint has been peeling for a while, and the couple knew it was an issue. But repainting the entire three-story house is a challenge for them, Bill said, and hiring someone would be expensive.

So when the Crawfords weren’t able to complete the project during the city’s 30-day time frame, they were charged with first-degree misdemeanors, which is punishable by as much as six months in jail or a $1,000 fine.

The couple appeared together Dec. 11 in Fairfield County Municipal Court for their arraignment. Because they went to court together the first time, they figured they would for their pretrial hearing, too. But Anna and Bill didn’t realize that, though they are co-defendants, they were assigned separate court dates moving forward.

On Feb. 12, a week after Anna’s assigned court date, Lancaster police arrested her for missing her court date. She had thought she was supposed to be in court later that month, which actually was her husband’s court date.

Anna spent one night in the Fairfield County jail. It’s an outcome that her attorney, James Linehan, said could have been avoided.

“Most people would think there are safeguards in place to make certain that a 69-year-old woman who is living on a military pension would not go to jail for failing to paint her house, but this case shows that those safeguards are insufficient,” Linehan said.

Lancaster’s code-enforcement department performed 5,200 total inspections last year, said Sean Fowler, the city’s code-enforcement director. That includes both initial and follow-up inspections.

Fowler said the majority of citations sent to residents come from complaints called into the department.

Linehan said criminalizing someone’s failure to do home maintenance is like “using a shotgun to kill a fly.”

Instead of a court date and jail time, Linehan said the city should offer services to people who are struggling to maintain their homes.

“If they can’t keep their house up, then there should be some social services available to help them,” Linehan said.

Fowler said the code-enforcement department doesn’t have a citywide program like that, but employees keep a list of churches and youth groups who have volunteered to help paint homes and mow lawns.

“We 100 percent want to work with people,” Fowler said. “We certainly try to be as reactive and comprehensive as we can be.”

The Crawfords said that all they want is for the issue to be resolved. They don’t understand why their house was cited when Anna said there are a number of other houses in the neighborhood that need fixing up, too.

Their next court dates are in early April, where they hope they can settle the issue. Until then, they’ll keep scraping off the old paint and working on their home.

“I know the house needs painted, there’s no disputing that,” Anna said. “It’s just a real disappointment how this has all been handled.”

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